


keep my eyes from closing

by inconocible



Series: swimming in sevens, slow dancing in seconds [4]
Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blind Kanan Jarrus, Canonical Character Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Everyone Needs A Hug, Ezra Leaves, F/M, Feelings Are Difficult, Force Bond (Star Wars), Gen, Heavy Angst, Kanan Jarrus is a Good Dad, Panic Attack, Post-Episode: s02e21-22 Twilight of the Apprentice, Suicidal Thoughts, That's Not How The Force Works, threats of suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-18
Updated: 2018-01-18
Packaged: 2019-03-06 08:52:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13407741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inconocible/pseuds/inconocible
Summary: A sudden, surprised exhale, a hard breath out, falls from Kanan’s lips. “He shut me out,” he says, gasping another hard breath in. He’s sitting up ramrod straight in the bed now, one hand pressed to his forehead, the other to his heart. “I can’t kriffing believe him.”





	keep my eyes from closing

**Author's Note:**

> won’t you lead the way  
> through my darker days  
> keep them softly spoken  
> show me the way  
> to a brighter place  
> keep my eyes from [closing](https://youtu.be/gPNbvVqfScQ?t=39s)

“Where’s Ezra going?” Kanan suddenly rasps, shifting under the covers, and at first Hera thinks he’s dreaming.

It’s only been three days since he came home, blind and in pain, and he’s been mostly sleeping, waking up briefly to take painkillers and use the fresher. Earlier today, he stayed up long enough to make tea and to ask Zeb to get ready to get his ass kicked by a blind guy in dejarik tomorrow. Hera wonders if that’s wishful thinking or maybe the painkillers talking, or if, maybe, Kanan is actually starting to feel like getting out of bed.

“Hera?” Kanan asks, and she turns a more attentive ear to him now that she realizes he’s awake.

“Hm?”

“Where’s Ezra going?” he repeats, more insistent.

“Ezra’s not going anywhere, dear,” she murmurs from where she sits awake on her side of the bed, reading over a report on her datapad, close enough to help Kanan if he needs it, but, in the same moment, so far away. She can’t look at him, can’t cross the inches of distance in the bed to touch him, keeps her eyes fixed on the datapad, not absorbing what she’s reading.

Kanan scoffs, a gravelly, harsh sound that in another life would have been a laugh. “He’s going somewhere,” he says, pushing up onto an elbow. The _Ghost_ shifts minutely: the familiar, unmistakable feeling of the _Phantom_ detaching. Hera scowls and picks up her comm.

A sudden, surprised exhale, a hard breath out, falls from Kanan’s lips. “He shut me out,” he says, gasping another hard breath in. He’s sitting up ramrod straight in the bed now, one hand pressed to his forehead, the other to his heart. “I can’t kriffing believe him.”

-

(These two things flash in rapid succession through Kanan’s mind:

The first thing: Ahsoka, a little more than a year ago, sitting in a meadow on Garel, insistent that Kanan and Ezra learn better control over both their bond and their general mental fortitude: Meditating with them, instructing them, proving to Kanan how much more he has yet to learn. Ezra, his questioning mind so much like Kanan’s. Their bond, dancing and sparkling with pride and love and learning, the giddy feeling of mastering something new, an intimate awareness of the brightness of each other.

Ahsoka, toward the end of her lesson, explaining about closing off a bond. She has them try it. Kanan can’t, he can’t bring himself to close it off all the way; he leaves a crack there, shuts it down as much as he feels like he can without hurting himself or Ezra.

Ezra tries next, enthusiastic in his inexperience. Ezra _succeeds_. Ezra is, in an instant, completely concealed from his mind, a cold duracrete wall where the familiar warmth of his Force presence once was.

“Good job, Ezra,” Ahsoka says, but she sounds suddenly miles away.

Kanan gasps in the face of the duracrete in his mind, feeling it like a punch to the gut. He is connected with both Ezra and Ahsoka in meditation still, and the memories, steeped in terrible, bone-deep pain – Grey and Styles, turning their weapons on him with glazed-over eyes as he freezes before them in shock; his master, snapping him out of it, screaming at him to run, that she’d be right behind him; the awful, interminable hours he spent curled up, in hiding and waiting and grief, on the cold ground in a cave on Kaller, trying not to scream out loud at the gaping wound in his psyche, gouged there in the moment of her death – these things, they flood the connection between the three of them before Kanan can stop them. Kanan doubles over, breathing too hard and too fast.

Ezra rips the bond between them back open, shock and concern and love flowing through, his hands reaching for Kanan’s.

Ten minutes later, when the bond has been fully restored and everyone has calmed down and Ahsoka, alarmed, has implored them to understand the depth to which their bond can both help and harm them, Ezra asks: “So… Why would you even want to _do_ that? Shut a bond off like that? Especially if it hurts so much.”

Kanan sighs. “Remember, Ezra, I’m.” He pauses, thinking intensely of his master. “You could say I’m damaged goods.” He shakes his head. “It’s not like that for most people.”

Ahsoka rolls her eyes at him.

“There are a lot of reasons to temporarily close off a Force bond,” she says, turning to Ezra, patient, wise. “If you or your partner are really sick or hurt, or something’s happening that will hurt the other person, it may be wiser to contain yourself, to help them. Or, if you’re trying to hide something from the other person.” Kanan quirks a frown at that, and Ahsoka shrugs. “Not passing value judgements, just saying. Like, if you’re working undercover, for example.” Ahsoka closes her eyes briefly, and Kanan perceives something painful there, under the surface.

She opens her eyes and continues the lesson.

“There aren’t as many reasons to _permanently_ close a bond,” she continues. “In the old days, a master and a Padawan ceremonially broke their bond when the Padawan passed their Trials and became a Knight. But…” Ahsoka smiles. “Not everyone always broke it completely, and often there was still a bond there, just a lesser one.”

“That can’t be the only reason,” Ezra counters.

Ahsoka’s eyes turn steely, her mouth straightening into a tight line. “There are other reasons,” she says somberly. “You will know it if it comes to it. I hope you never do.”)

-

(The second thing: On Malachor, three days ago, the Dark side of the Force blanketing the planet, clouding their bond. Ezra, throttling his side down, throwing up temporary walls. _What are you doing_ , Kanan thinks to Ezra, cautious.

 _I got this, Kanan_ , Ezra projects back, over-confident.

Then: The pain in his face, searing physical pain like nothing he’s ever felt before, flooding through his body as he floats back to consciousness. He slams down his side of the bond as tightly as he can without closing it completely, not wanting to distract Ezra, not wanting him to get hurt by diverting his attention to the sudden spike of distress.

 _Go, Ezra_ , Kanan thinks, trying to smother everything else from seeping through, even as he uses the strongest voice he can muster to call to Ahsoka, asking her to go get Ezra. _You can do this_ , he thinks, pushing the thought fiercely to Ezra through the pain. _I believe in you_.

Finally, in the _Phantom_ : “Ezra,” Kanan gasps, surfacing from a wave of pain. Ezra has been tightly clinging to the bond – and to Kanan – while he sobs, but all Kanan is getting back from him is guilt, guilt and fear, and it’s really not helping either of them right now. “We need to – our bond – keep it closed – just for a little while.” He had attempted opening it earlier, just a touch, when he first took Ezra in his arms, but it was no good. The amount of pain he was in had overshadowed any projection of love or calm or reassurance he could have sent.

“Why?” Ezra asks, breathy, exhausted, his damp face still pressed into Kanan’s shoulder.

“We need to focus,” Kanan grits out. What he doesn’t say is that the weight of Ezra’s feelings on top of the pain in his ruined face is pushing him to the point that he feels like he might pass out again. “I don’t – we gotta focus. Need to get some bacta on my face. Need to get home.”

A long silence passes, in which Kanan tries and fails to imagine the expression on Ezra’s face. Kanan reels momentarily at the thought that he’ll probably never see Ezra again. Ezra catches the thought through the bond, despite Kanan’s best efforts, and a fresh round of tears springs from him, pressed into Kanan’s shirt. Kanan squeezes his shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” he whispers, setting his lips to the crown of Ezra’s head.

Kanan tries to remember the last time they did this, the last time he was a rock for Ezra, was a good master, held him while he broke down, but that was lifetimes and ages ago, on Lothal, and it hurts too much to think about. Everything hurts too much.

“Please,” Kanan finally says, softly, desperately. “I’m sorry, I can’t, I – I need you to be strong for us, kiddo. Just for a little while.”

Ezra sighs, sniffs, pulls back. “Okay,” Ezra says, “I understand,” and Kanan feels a dark, iron resolve shutting off Ezra’s side of the bond nearly completely, the crack in the door smaller than the one Kanan has left on his side, just barely enough to avoid throwing Kanan into the panic he experienced on Garel.

Ezra withdraws from his embrace.)

-

“What in the nine Sith hells,” Kanan mutters. He takes a few panicky breaths. “He completely kriffing shut me out. Damn it.” There’s no heat behind his curses. Instead, there’s a haunted, far-away quality to his voice that Hera can’t bring herself to dwell on right now.

“Chopper,” Hera growls into the comm. “Are you with Ezra?”

An answer back in binary, an annoyed series of blips and beeps.

“You’re _dropping_ him _off_?” Hera exclaims. “Ezra! I am this ship’s captain and you are _not_ allowed to take the _Phantom_ anywhere!”

Ezra sighs in frustration over the comm. “I _know_ , Hera,” he says. “I’m not gonna _keep_ it. Chopper’s gonna bring it right back, then he’ll come pick me up later. Whenever I’m ready.”

“Whenever you’re _ready_?” Hera asks. “I don’t think so. Where in the stars are you going?”

“I need to be by myself for a while,” Ezra answers. “I think it’s best. For everyone.” He jams the transmission.

“Ugh, for stars’ sake,” she groans, moving to get out of bed, to race off and stop him. Kanan reaches for her, grabbing her by the elbow.

“Let him go,” Kanan whispers. His other hand is still on his heart.

“Kanan,” Hera starts, sharp, mad, “you can’t seriously think –“

“Let him go, Hera,” Kanan says again. He releases her elbow, scrubs at his beard, takes a few deep breaths, covers his heart with both hands, rounding in on himself as though in pain. “Let him go.”

Hera feels her indignation rise in her stomach, along with a strand of worry at Kanan’s reaction. “What if the Inquisitors track him down? Kanan, you can’t seriously think he’ll be safe alone out there.”

Kanan shrugs and swallows hard, seeming to struggle for his breath. “It’d be no different than if they tracked us here, except now he won’t have to worry about me holding him back,” he says, his voice wavering. He clenches his jaw. “He wants to go, let him go. I can’t stop him. He knows exactly what he’s doing.”

-

When Chopper returns with the otherwise-empty _Phantom_ 14 standard hours later, Hera calls a family meeting. Sabine complains that it can’t be a family meeting with just five of them. “Well, this is what we’re going to have to get used to,” Hera snaps.

Most of the meeting is Hera, crisply and sharply reassigning duties to adapt to Ezra’s absence and Kanan’s blindness, and everyone else, grim in the face of the chore chart on her datapad. She has swapped things basically back to the system they used before Ezra joined the crew, with a few modifications for Kanan, but no one seems happy. Zeb and Sabine start to bicker over dishes and mopping, until Hera, uncharacteristically frustrated, slams her open palm down on the dejarik table.

“Enough,” she says, low and serious, her words lilting ever so slightly into a Rylothian accent. (They all know better than to cross Hera when she’s so upset that her accent surfaces.) “We’ll follow this schedule until Ezra gets back, and that’s final.”

Sabine and Zeb look at the floor.

Hera wrestles control over her accent, changes the subject, turns on Zeb and Sabine and Chopper with interrogative firmness – “At least one of you knows where he is, and we are not leaving this room until you tell me” – eventually dragging Ezra’s destination – Takodana – out of Zeb.

Chopper makes annoyed noises at Zeb for being the first to spill. Zeb wrings his hands.

“The kid said he needed somewhere to disappear for a while,” Zeb says, anxious, conciliatory. “Maz’s place is safe enough, the drinks are cheap enough, the girls are cheap enough, and usually clean.”

Hera scowls.

“What?” Zeb asks, holding his hands defensively open in front of his chest. “It wasn’t like I was going to be able to stop him. I’m just glad he took my suggestion.”

The meeting breaks up. Kanan hasn’t said a word.

“He’s too much like you,” Hera fires at Kanan on her way out of the galley, poking an angry finger into his chest, her accent wavering again under the force of her emotions. Kanan shrugs, captures her hand in both of his.

“You mean, me before you?” he asks softly. “He’s basically an adult, more than I was, at least. And…” Kanan trails off, lost in a thoughtful moment, runs his thumb over Hera’s palm. “He’s not like me. He has something to come home to,” he says.

Hera glares daggers at him and pulls her hand from his grasp, marching away toward the cockpit. Chopper, following her, bonks Kanan on the knee, rudely narrating how much Hera would probably like to strangle him. “I know, I know,” Kanan mutters.

-

(Zeb knows, just as Kanan does, the depths of the volatile mixture of grief and guilt and failure and self-hatred, and the allure of drinking and fucking and pirating oneself into oblivion when in those depths. Zeb also knows, just as Kanan does, that Maz’s place is, by most galactic standards, a pretty okay one for said drinking and fucking and pirating to happen in.

“Don’t beat yourself up, Zeb,” Kanan says, out of the blue, a few hours after Hera’s family meeting adjourns.

They’re alone in the galley now, playing dejarik, Kanan somehow kicking Zeb’s ass as promised. Kanan had asked Zeb the day before to pull the hand-carved set out of storage instead of playing with holograms, had told Zeb he thought he’d start there, with pieces on the game board, before moving onto weapons or anything more complicated, slowly developing a plan to train his mind and his Force skills to adapt his new blindness. Zeb, of course, couldn’t deny the request, and has been enjoying the game more than he thought he would, but he can’t get his mind off of missing Ezra.

Somehow, Kanan knows.

“Takodana’s the best place you could’ve sent him, for what he thinks he wants,” Kanan says.

“Hm,” Zeb says.

Kanan lets the thought rest, then picks it up a few minutes later as he’s reaching out in the Force, tracking Zeb’s next move on the game board. The game is winding to a close, and Kanan has only faltered a few times in the past hour; Zeb’s impressed.

“You know, knowing he can come home whenever he wants, I think he won’t feel quite so… trapped, like we both did, before,” Kanan muses.

Zeb shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says, even though he knows exactly what Kanan’s talking about, knows perfectly well why Hera enforces a strict no alcohol policy on her ship. Kanan’s problems are also his problems, in this arena.

He and Kanan, both, in separate yet equal ways, were, at one time, victims of mass genocide, and they both tried, and failed, to find answers in the bottoms of thousands of glasses, in hundreds of cantinas.

Which, thinking about it, is not quite Ezra’s current situation, so, maybe, he thinks. Maybe Kanan’s right. Maybe Ezra will be home again in just a few days, contrite and ready to start anew.

Kanan makes his move on the game board with the Force, not even touching the piece. “Karabast,” Zeb mutters – the move has him trapped into a corner. Kanan smirks, the ghost of his old self flitting over his face.

“I called Maz,” Zeb offers as he strategizes his next move. “Asked her keep an eye out for him.”

“That was good of you,” Kanan says.

Zeb makes a noise of agreement in the back of his throat. “He said he’d probably come home by his birthday, at most,” he says. “You know how much he hates spending Empire Day alone.”

Kanan nods.

Ezra’s 17th birthday is in five and a half months.

“But, Kanan – he was – so, _strange_ , before he left,” Zeb says quietly, finally moving his next game piece. “Something kriffed in his head. Aren’t you afraid he won’t come back?”

Kanan sighs. “I don’t know, Zeb,” he says. “I’m as clueless as you are. All we can do is wait.”

Zeb raises a surprised eyebrow before he remembers that Kanan can’t see it. Somehow, though, Kanan knows, cocking his head to one side, anticipating Zeb’s question.

“What do you mean?” Zeb asks. “I thought you two were… _connected._ ”

Kanan leans his chin in his hand, his elbow propped on the table. “Not anymore,” he says.)

-

Weeks pass.

Hera works hard, builds the base up from a handful of exhausted, injured fighters to a real cadre of more than 100.

Kanan is deeply proud of her, but never really gets a chance to see her, to tell her.

Hera gets up before dawn, while Kanan still rests, and goes to bed late into the night cycle, when Kanan is already asleep. If he reaches for her, she turns away. Sex? Forget about it.

At first, Kanan thinks it’s him. Thinks it’s his ruined face, his new introspective manner, the way he has to constantly look inward, has to reach for the Force to do anything. The way he has become a damaged good.

While Hera plans and plots and recruits and spies and flies and fights, Kanan spends long hours kneeling in meditation, trying to re-teach himself everything, missing Ahsoka and Ezra fiercely, wishing for the company of even one other Force user. He interrogates every angle of the Holocron Master Billaba left him, even though only the words, not the images, are useful to him anymore. Zeb and Sabine indulge him in games of dejarik and some light training, but Kanan still feels useless at the end of many days, especially in the face of Hera’s utter productivity.

So, maybe it’s just him. Maybe he needs to recuperate more.

But weeks, and then months, roll by. He starts to think he’s making slow but steady progress – and he starts to think, maybe it’s her, too.

Three months into Ezra’s absence, into Kanan’s blindness, Kanan catches Hera crying in the dead of the night cycle. He turns over in bed, the sudden ripple of misery in her Force signature having woken him.

“Hera,” he says, gentle. He perceives that she’s sitting cross-legged on her side of the bed, a datapad in one hand, as usual these days. He sits up, lays a palm on her warm, bare shoulder.

“Talk to me,” he murmurs. A familiar refrain from their early years together, but a flip of the usual script. In the old days, it was always her, there, drawing him out of his bitter shell, soothing his restless, sleepless nights. Now he wonders if, how, he can help her.

He’s been thinking a lot about those early years recently, the years before the kids, when he was falling in love with her voice, her vibrancy, her steadfastness. He’s been trying to figure out if, how, to get back there. Trying to figure out if, how, they can love each other again; if, how, she could love a damaged good.

Hera is still crying, not answering him. “Talk to me, love,” he says again.

“I got some intel from Sabine’s friend, Ketsu,” she says, and he feels her shoulder blade move under his palm, perceives that she’s wiping her face with her hands. He reaches for her more closely, lays his hand at the base of her lek in a way that always used to draw her in, but she turns her head away.

He sighs, takes his hand back. He can take a hint.

“And?” he asks.

Hera is silent for a long beat. “Ezra is running jobs for Hondo now,” she finally says. “ _And_ tending Maz’s bar part-time.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Kanan asks.

Hera, for the first time in months, reaches for Kanan first, abruptly taking his hand in hers.

“I don’t know if he’s ever coming home, Kanan,” she says, her voice cracking over the syllables of his name.

Kanan squeezes her hand, gathers his breath and his thoughts, hopeful, thinking maybe she’s finally ready to talk about it – about everything – but Hera pulls away.

“I have work to do,” she whispers. She gets out of bed.

Another two months pass, and Kanan is still stuck trying to figure out if. How.

-

So then, finally: Five and a half months later.

“We need to give him space,” Kanan says at the dinner table, at which Ezra does not sit. “He’ll come around in time.”

When Ezra had gotten back, 48 hours earlier, Hera had been so overwhelmed that everything she had to say accidentally came out too sharp and too mad (“Don’t you _ever_ dare do that to us again,” was not well-received), and so Kanan hadn’t gotten a chance to say much of anything at all before Ezra had retreated, back to the _Phantom_.

Kanan had not tried connecting with Ezra in the Force, finding the duracrete wall where their bond once brightly shone still firmly intact, though buzzing with a renewed energy, with the physical closeness of Ezra.

It needed more time.

“He’ll come around,” Kanan insists.

“We’ll see,” Hera answers.

-

It is his third day back on Atollon. It is the day before his 17th birthday. It is the day before Empire Day.

Ezra emerges from the _Phantom._ Carefully avoiding Hera, he waits until after lunchtime to creep into Sabine’s room, to ask her to buzz his hair again.

“Sure, of course I can,” she says. “Though I’m surprised you kept it like that.”

“What can I say, I like it short,” Ezra says.

She doesn’t ask who’s been cutting his hair for him while he’s been gone.

She sits him down at her desk chair, just as she did the night he left. That night, she was trying to talk him out of leaving; today, she struggles with the silence between them. She thinks of Kanan’s insistence to give Ezra space and time.

Give him some space, yeah, right, she thinks. She moves up close into Ezra’s space, touching his shoulders and arms as she wraps an old towel around his neck to catch bits of hair. His muscles have filled out considerably in his absence. Ezra looks at her, too, assessing her in a way she’s never felt from him before.

She’s missed him.

“You look so much older now,” she teases. “You grew up, I think.”

He rolls his eyes, but lets his hands hover for a moment over her hips before resting on the small of her back briefly, pulling her into a loose embrace. “Maybe we both did,” he says, serious, nearly sultry. Sabine flushes.

(He deftly plucks the smallest pistol from her utility belt, conceals it in his sleeve, deposits it in his jacket pocket when she turns her back to get the clippers.)

Her door is half-open, and Zeb wanders in when she’s halfway done with Ezra’s hair. He perches on Sabine’s bed, trying to joke, to cajole details of Ezra’s time away out of him.

Ezra doesn’t take the bait.

“I don’t really want to talk about it,” Ezra says finally, when Sabine is done with his hair. He stands up, fishes in the pocket of his pants, and withdraws a wad of credits that he presses into Zeb’s hand. “But here’s your loan, and a little extra,” he says, not quite meeting Zeb’s eyes.

“Thanks, kid.” Zeb runs a hand over his face. “So, uh, what do you want for your birthday dinner tomorrow?” he tries.

Ezra looks at the floor for a long moment. He swallows heavily. “To go back in time and never be born,” he says, quiet.

“Ezra,” Sabine starts, “you don’t mean that –“

“Yes, I do,” Ezra insists, his energy swinging suddenly from withdrawn to keyed-up. He storms from the room. “I wish I had never been born!” he calls over his shoulder.

Sabine, caught completely off guard, collapses on her bed next to Zeb.

“What is _wrong_ with him?” she gasps, surprising herself when she starts to cry.

Zeb shakes his head. “Some things take a long time to get through,” he says, laying an arm around her shoulders, pulling her into his side.

-

Ezra sits in the cargo hold of the _Phantom_ as the evening stretches on, staring at the Sith Holocron that he’s opened at least once a day since Malachor, simultaneously terrified of it and drawn to it, intrigued by it, still trying to make sense of the knowledge the cruel spirit inside has to offer.

He’s been looking at it, listening to it, for several hours now, ever since he ran from Sabine and Zeb earlier in the afternoon. He’s in the same seat he and Kanan sat in on the way back to Malachor, still drowning in guilt.

It’s surreal. Almost six months of being away, indulging in cheap alcohol and whores, and meeting all kinds of beings while helping Maz out in exchange for a room, and running occasional jobs for Hondo – all of these things have done nothing but delay the inevitable, he thinks, because here he is, back in the _Phantom_ , still trying to come home from Malachor.

He feels suddenly overwhelmed, turning Sabine’s pistol over in his hands, feeling darkness rushing up over him, into him, feeding off of the energy in the Holocron. But instead of feeling powerful, fortified by the dark knowledge, he feels scared and alone. Scared, and alone, and helpless, and deep, so deep into his self-hatred, in a way he’d been able to almost avoid over the past months, if he could manage to get drunk enough. But he’s been sober for nearly five days now, and he realizes that he feels so much worse than he did the night he left for Takodana.

How is that possible?

He feels so alone, hollow. He misses his connection with the Light side intensely, misses Ahsoka and Kanan intensely. He nearly chances it, nearly opens the bond, nearly calls out for Kanan, but in a moment of hesitation, Ezra feels another wave of bitter darkness wash over him. He whimpers and bites his lip, unable to kriffing bear himself.

How could Kanan ever bear to be fully bonded with him again?

How could anyone ever bear to even look at him, knowing everything he ruined?

How could he ever bear to look at Kanan again, knowing Kanan will never be able to see him in return?

Certainly, he’s not following Kanan’s directions from six months ago very well – he’s not staying strong enough for the both of them. He’s barely managed to stay strong enough for himself, keeping himself alive, sure, but smothering his connection with the Light side of the Force in his solitude, becoming more entrenched in the Dark every day.

He would never be able to keep all of his shit from hurting Kanan if they reconnected.

So, then, the only answer is to stay separated.

Ezra feels angry tears welling in his eyes. He grits his teeth and clenches his fists, the pistol cool and reassuring in his right hand, his fingernails pressing furious half-moons into the palm of his left hand.

Isn’t he foolish, the black voice curling through his thoughts asks, for trying to be both a Jedi and a Sith? Hasn’t he failed at being both? Isn’t he a worthless, helpless, useless, unwanted _orphan_? Who not even Kanan, maybe the worst Jedi living in the galaxy right now ( _maybe the only Jedi living in the galaxy right now, thanks to me_ , his traitorous mind adds), wants?

Kanan didn’t try to stop him from leaving, six months ago. Why would he want him back now?

Ezra stares down at the gun.

-

Kanan, who still has barely spoken to Ezra since his return, is kneeling in the cool sand, meditating in the warm summer Atollon evening, when he senses it: A rush of hatred and darkness in the _Phantom_ , hundreds of yards away. He feels it in his head, too, beginning to spill over the duracrete wall in his mind where Ezra should be.

“Ezra,” he whispers, turning his head toward the _Ghost_ , watching the Dark side of the Force swirl around what he knows is his Padawan, though Ezra looks different in the Force, now, not the same ball of sparkling light that he used to be, when Kanan first found him.

Kanan gets to his feet, brushing grains of sand from his knees. He takes a chance, the first he’s taken in nearly six months, pushing at the closed door of his bond with Ezra. _Hey, talk to me_ , he projects.

 _No,_ comes the resolute answer, laced with something bitter and cold.

Kanan isn’t so sure about that. He sets his jaw. _Come on_ , he thinks, sending that thought to Ezra as he jogs from his meditation spot back to the _Ghost_ , a sudden urgency quickening his stride.

 _Leave me alone_ , Ezra fires back, and Kanan takes it as a small victory that, even closed off, Ezra is hearing him, is answering him.

Kanan may be a damaged good. Some things that were broken may never get fixed, and others may need more time and care and work on the ifs and the hows, but this? This bond?

As he draws closer to the _Ghost_ , Kanan remembers, unbidden, sitting in his master’s quarters, demanding an answer to the rumor going around that, despite the Council’s endorsement, she was damaged goods, not fit to train a Padawan or lead a squadron, thanks to her deep brush with the Dark side.

Remembers her kind hand on his shoulder, her sad face, her explanation that only when we are damaged can we truly understand how fragile all beings are. That brushing the dark can bring needed perspective on embracing the light. That journeying so far with ourselves shows us how much farther we have the capacity to go. That failure is the best teacher.

 _Talk to me_ , Kanan projects to Ezra. He feels, somehow, the ghost of the warmth of his master’s Force signature, thrumming in the back of his awareness, bolstering his resolve.

 _No_ , Ezra forcefully projects back. _I’m never talking to you again, not like this._

If Kanan can’t get this right, he thinks to himself, then maybe he really is useless. Maybe Ezra really is gone.

But Kanan reflects on his own strength, rebuilt in the Force over the past few months. He isn’t ready to give in to either of those possibilities, he decides.

Another jolt of darkness touches his mind.

 _Ezra, what are you doing_ , Kanan thinks at the duracrete wall, at the locked door in his awareness, and the thought takes him right back to Malachor, asking the same thing of his Padawan then, the Dark side of the Force clouding his perception of Ezra.

Ezra’s side of the bond is silent but for hatred swirling in it.

Kanan pounds aboard the _Ghost_.

“Kanan?” Sabine asks, startled, from the dejarik table, where she sits with her sketchbook and a cup of tea.

“This is between me and Ezra,” he tells her, his foot on the rung of the ladder to the _Phantom._

“What is?” she asks.

“Whatever the kriff it is,” he mutters, climbing the ladder.

-

“Go away!” Ezra yells as Kanan’s head appears in the hatch. He pulls the barrel of the pistol up, closer to his face, level with his chin, staring Kanan down as he climbs up into the _Phantom_. “Leave me alone!”

“Ezra,” Kanan says. The Holocron pulses with an unusual energy that Kanan can see in the Force. He feels the pull of its darkness, wonders how Ezra managed to live with that pull, alone, for nearly six months, without falling to it completely. “What’s going on?” he asks, feeling strange, dark energy swirling around Ezra.

Sabine has followed Kanan up into the _Phantom_ , and both Ezra and Kanan hear her gasp, but only Ezra sees how she covers her mouth with both hands.

“Ezra!” she says. “What are you doing?”

“Let me handle this,” Kanan says to her.

“What does it _look_ like I’m doing?” Ezra asks, sharp, wounded. “Oh, sorry, I forgot,” he adds, sarcastic and brittle and mean. “Uh, Kanan, I’m holding Sabine’s pistol. I’m – I’m gonna end this. I’m gonna make everyone’s lives better.”

“No,” Kanan says, pushing away the panic that flares as he understands what Ezra means. “You’re not.”

“Just leave me the kriff alone,” Ezra says. He presses the barrel of the gun to his temple.

“No!” Sabine exclaims.

Ezra pushes his hatred at Kanan around the edges of their closed-off bond. “I hate you,” he says, his hands shaking.

“You’re lying,” Kanan says, taking a cautious step forward.

“I’m not lying!” Ezra argues, his voice gathering strength. “I hate you, Kanan!” he roars.

“Too bad,” Kanan says.

“Too bad?” Ezra asks. “Kriff you, we both hate me, just let me do this!”

“Yeah, too bad,” Kanan says, taking another cautious step toward Ezra, “because I love you, Ezra.”

Ezra wrenches his eyes closed, but his tears still fall anyway. “No, you don’t,” he argues back after a long moment, pressing the pistol more firmly against his forehead. “I _ruined your life_ , and Ahsoka’s, and, and everybody’s. You _have_ to hate me.”

“None of what you just said is true,” Kanan counters, reaching a gentle hand slowly toward Ezra. “Put the gun down. We can figure this out together.”

Ezra flinches away. He flips the safety off of the pistol. “I said leave me alone!” he screams. With his free hand, he reaches out with the Force, using it in anger, pushing Kanan away. Kanan lands on his backside at Sabine’s feet.

“Kanan,” she says, anxious tears gathering in her eyes, reaching for him, helping him up. Kanan shakes her off, gets to his feet.

“Why are you doing this?” Kanan asks.

“I hate myself,” Ezra sobs, staring into the Holocron. “Everything is my fault. I’m a –“ he swallows, wet and messy, and wipes furiously at his eyes with his free hand. “I’m a Sith,” he chokes out.

“What?” Sabine gasps.

Kanan chuckles, low and soft and fond. “Ezra, you are _not_ a Sith,” he says. “Touching the Dark side is different from _being_ _a Sith_. If you were a Sith, you wouldn’t have come back here with so much regret.”

“Don’t laugh at me,” Ezra snaps. “It’s true! I _have to be_ a Sith, otherwise I couldn’t have opened the Holocron.”

“Okay, so what,” Kanan says, holding his hands out in a shrug. “So you touched the Dark side, so you opened the Holocron. Ezra, touching the dark can help you learn to embrace the light. It’s okay to make mistakes. We can figure it out together.”

Kanan pushes again on the bond. _Please, please, Ezra, listen to me._

“Kanan,” Ezra exclaims, “no, it’s not _okay_! I – I opened it the night we got back. I just wanted to know what was inside, I wanted that kriffing mission to have been worth it, but I – I felt it calling me, I couldn’t – and I thought if I got away, if I could forget, that it would leave me alone, that I wouldn’t hurt anyone.” He takes a sobbing breath. “But it didn’t, it stayed, right under the surface, even when I was totally kriffed up. There’s no other solution, I’m sorry, I’ve tried, but I don’t know another way to stop it.”

“It _is_ okay,” Kanan says, his tone gentle, but his mind crashing against the locked door in their bond. “I promise you, we can figure it out together.”

“No,” Ezra counters. He gestures wildly with his free hand as he speaks, still holding the pistol to his head with his other. “There’s no _figuring it out_. I tried, okay? There’s either embracing being a Sith, or ending this, once and for all.”

“Those are not the only choices,” Kanan says. “There’s always a third path.”

“It’s too late,” Ezra says, his finger hovering near the trigger. He swallows heavily. “I’m – I’m sorry, Kanan, I’ve gotta do this.”

Kanan sighs, a deep and weary sound. He runs his hand over his face, still for a moment.

Ezra sniffs. “I’m so sorry,” he whispers.

Kanan can feel Ezra’s mental shields trembling, can feel the duracrete wall shaking, threatening to crumble, even as he feels, sees, in the Force, how close Ezra is to pulling the trigger.

“Ezra,” Kanan finally says, resolute. “I know I can’t protect you from everything. But I can, and I _will_ , protect you right now.”

All at once, before Ezra can react, Kanan reaches out in the Force, grasping Ezra hard by the shoulders, taking him by surprise, pinning him against the wall of the _Phantom_.

Sabine’s pistol sails out of Ezra’s grip, across the room and into Kanan’s hand. Kanan hands the pistol back to her. She takes it, flips the safety on, tucks it into the empty holster in her utility belt. Kanan is distantly aware of her steps moving away, halfway down the ladder back into the _Ghost_ , can faintly hear her calling for Hera, but his attention is laser-focused on Ezra.

“Let me go!” Ezra screams, struggling against the Force hold Kanan maintains on his shoulders. Tears track unchecked down his cheeks. “Or just kriffing kill me yourself!”

“No,” Kanan says. He crosses the _Phantom_ , holding Ezra against the wall with the Force, pushing harder in his mind against Ezra’s closed-off side of their bond.

Coming close, Kanan takes Ezra’s face in one hand, cupping his chin between his index finger and thumb. Ezra flinches, shakes, and Kanan knows it’s not just from the Force hold he’s got on him. He hasn’t touched Ezra in six months, and touching him now sends an electric current, an intense mixture of relief and pain, through his skin and into their bond, ramming against Ezra’s locked-down side.

“I don’t want to hurt you, kiddo,” Kanan says, running his thumb over the point of Ezra’s chin.

“Then let me go,” Ezra says, straining his arms against Kanan’s Force hold.

“Look at me,” Kanan asks, impossibly gentle. _Look at me here, let me in here_ , he pleads across the bond.

“I can’t,” Ezra gasps. “Not after what I did, I –“

“Look at me, Ezra,” Kanan says again.

“No!” Ezra says. “I can’t, I hate you!”

Kanan smiles, sad and rueful. “Too bad,” he says. “Please,” he whispers, echoing the request in his mind, _please, please_. “We can figure this out if you _let me help you_.”

Ezra’s tears run over his fingers, down his arm. Ezra finally meets Kanan’s milky, blind eyes with his own bloodshot ones for the briefest moment before looking away with a harsh sob, his whole body hitching. Somehow, Kanan knows this, feels Ezra’s gaze trained on him, then shuttered.

“I can’t,” Ezra says. But Kanan feels Ezra’s mental walls slowly, finally, perhaps not of Ezra’s own volition, coming down. He feels darkness spilling out from behind them, crumbling them in its wake as Ezra runs out of energy to fight.

“I can’t look at you without hating myself so much,” Ezra admits in a small voice. “I _did that_ to you.”

“Hey, I need you to listen to me here,” Kanan says. “What happened was not your fault. I love you, Ezra, and I always will, no matter what. You’re my _Padawan_. My kid.”

“No,” Ezra argues, taking a gasping breath in. “You can’t, you can’t, I –“

“I forgive you,” Kanan says. “I forgave you a long time ago. But you need to forgive yourself. What happened was _not your fault._ ”

“I _hate_ myself,” Ezra grits out.

“Too bad,” Kanan whispers, both his hands on Ezra’s face, wiping tears from his cheeks. “I love you.”

“How could you?” Ezra sobs. Kanan feels their bond coming back to life, weak and faint, half-shuttered, obscured by fear and darkness, but there, suddenly, fixed in his awareness.

Kanan sighs in relief, sending all of his care and forgiveness and love at the bond, trying to get Ezra to open it up a little more.

“Come here, kiddo,” he murmurs, moving one hand to the back of Ezra’s head and the other between Ezra’s shoulder blades, releasing the Force hold, catching Ezra in a tight embrace. Kanan falls to his knees on the floor under Ezra’s weight; Ezra slots into him, also on his knees, nearly in a meditation pose but for the fact that Kanan is holding him up. Ezra tucks his face into the crook of Kanan’s neck and shoulder, just like he did in nearly the very same spot in the _Phantom_ weeks ago, leaving Malachor; he’s sobbing uncontrollably, just like he did then.

“Kanan,” Ezra pleads through his tears, running out of words. Through their slowly-opening bond Kanan feels emptiness and grief and loss and self-exile and self-hatred and the insidious curl of black thoughts not Ezra’s own and –

“I know,” Kanan says, strengthening his mind against these things, running his hands over Ezra’s hair and back, pressing his lips to the top of Ezra’s head. His body is between Ezra’s and the Holocron, and he shifts slightly in a protective impulse to keep the dark artifact out of Ezra’s line of sight. “I know, I know, I’ve got you,” he murmurs, and he feels it through their bond as a strange sense of déjà vu strikes them both.

It is as though the journey home from Malachor has taken an extra six months.

Ezra shivers. Kanan feels Ezra’s pulse racing, his chest heaving against his own, and he presses calmness and ease and understanding through the bond. He searches for Ezra’s bright spark, tries to swim through the dark feelings that aren’t native to Ezra, to find the part of Ezra that hasn’t been overrun. “Calm down, focus on the light,” Kanan whispers. “I’ve got you, it’s over.”

In his peripheral thoughts, Kanan feels the brightness of Hera close to him in the Force as she steps into the _Phantom_ , lingering in the doorway.

“Everything’s so cold and dark,” Ezra whimpers, holding the front of Kanan’s shirt in desperate fists.

“I know, kiddo,” Kanan rasps, his throat tight as he rubs Ezra’s back. He wishes he could still physically cry, his ruined eyes prickling painfully. “I know. I’m so sorry. We’re gonna figure it out.”

“I don’t think we can,” Ezra says. Through their bond, he projects things like worthless and stupid and unwanted and cold and dark, so dark; Kanan pushes back against them with forgiveness and love and warmth.

Kanan shakes his head. “It’s not gonna be easy, and it’s not gonna be quick, but we will, okay? We’ll figure it out.” He pulls back half an arm’s-length from Ezra, takes one hand off of Ezra’s back, brushes tears from Ezra’s face.

“Just let me in,” he whispers, nudging at the last of the mental fortifications Ezra has in place against him, the last crumbles of the duracrete wall, the last splinters of the locked door, searching intensely for the essence of Ezra’s Force signature, its brightness. “Please.”

“You’ll hate me,” Ezra says. “The things I did, the things I thought, the things I learned from the Holocron –“

“No,” Kanan says. “I promise you, no matter what happens, I could never, ever hate you. I love you, Ezra. You’re my kid.”

Distantly, Kanan hears Hera’s breath hitch, and he knows she’s crying, too. She feels lightyears away, he’s so surrounded by _Ezra_ , even though he knows she’s just a few feet from them.

Ezra sighs, and Kanan feels the last of the wall crumble, feels Ezra’s side of the bond thrown, finally, wide open. Emotions rush at him, and darkness, so much darkness, laced with fear and pain and guilt, the final thing Ezra had been holding back. Stars, he could drown in Ezra’s guilt.

But it doesn’t matter, because buried there, under it all, is Ezra’s true self: luminous, warm, weak but still holding on, glittering in the light of the Force.

Finding Ezra there, _seeing_ him again, feels to Kanan like recovering the use of a missing limb. He magnifies Ezra’s light, drinks it in, reflects it back to him, releasing, as best as he can, the darkness to the Force and taking only the light, using it to fill the black hole in his mind, in his heart, to send more of it back to Ezra.

“There you are,” Kanan whispers reverently. “I’ve got you, kiddo. I’ve got you.”

It doesn’t matter what Ezra has done. He may be damaged, but he’s still here. He’s home.

“I missed you, Kanan,” Ezra chokes out through a fresh round of tears, trembling in Kanan’s arms. “I missed you so much.”

Kanan hold Ezra as tight as he can, floored by the intensity of Ezra’s emotions, of his own emotions. He opens his side of the bond as deep and as wide as it will go, projecting the endless love and care and fierce protectiveness he feels, tamping down on the guilt swirling in the Force, pushing it away from them both.

“I missed you too,” he says, breathing a tired sigh into Ezra’s hair. “I missed you too.”

**Author's Note:**

> i'm watching the series for the first time and i'm trying to stay semi spoiler-free. so this is what happened when i finished season 2 and read that 6 months (including ezra's birthday) pass between it and the first episode of season 3, and wondered why. so i'm just gonna go right ahead and call this an au because i'm pretty positive it's not canon-compliant. but i couldn't move on to season 3 without getting this out of me.  
> my [tumblr](https://inconocible.tumblr.com/) is a kanan jarrus: space dad appreciation blog now


End file.
